sparse

But research showing cognitive benefits in humans is sparse, as is that on cell repair and longevity — a category that’s particularly hard to study anyway.

From MarketWatch ● Oct. 16, 2026

The Dashwoods are forced to move into a sparse little cottage and make the best of their much-reduced income.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 15, 2026

But when Walker and Auen plunge our cipher, Béatrice, into the world of sparse electrostatic video, the result is both harrowing and unbelievably beautiful.

From Salon ● Sep. 7, 2026

If USC had maintained its traditional rivalry scheduling with Notre Dame this season, they would have sold out the Coliseum on Thanksgiving Saturday instead of subjecting a sparse August crowd to possible heatstroke.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 5, 2026

She loomed into the room in a starchy nightdress, and her sparse hair was tied up in rags.

From "Secrets at Sea" by Richard Peck

New entries are sparser now than in the years following the Covid pandemic, when the auto industry ground to a halt, and in the aftermath of the auto industry crisis of the 2007-09 recession.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 29, 2026

However, Williams said, there are important differences between regions where fires erupt in forests with abundant vegetation fuel and regions like Southern California, where fires often burn through sparser shrubs and grasses.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 16, 2025

In contrast to conventional computing where every part of the system is always on and available to communicate with any other part all the time, activation in neuromorphic computing can be sparser.

From BBC ● Jun. 17, 2024

While experts had previously speculated that Gigantopithecus was driven to extinction as their preferred forest habitats became sparser, the known fossils of the ape lacked defined dates to test the idea.

From National Geographic ● Jan. 10, 2024

They wander, as we do, searching for facts to fit their sparser stock of hypotheses, but when the receptor meets its match, there is only a single thud.

From "The Lives of a Cell" by Lewis Thomas

It’s a volcanic buildup of a song, from the sparsest ticking electronics to a hard-rock stomp to a full-scale pileup of guitars, drums and horns.

From New York Times ● Mar. 1, 2024

In this case, the error is making a call based on the sparsest of evidence.

From Scientific American ● Oct. 15, 2021

Turnouts for elections in 2014, 2015 and 2016 ranked among the sparsest in Indiana and broke local records for all-time lows.

From Washington Times ● Oct. 23, 2018

The more successful moments, at least from a purely musical standpoint, were the sparsest: a solo piano performance by John Legend, and a similarly scaled delivery by Taylor Swift, before she shifted into hair-tossing bombast.

From Chicago Tribune ● Jan. 27, 2014

It’s the sparsest bed I’ve ever seen: small and pale yellow with a sheet, a topsheet, and one pillow.

From "It’s Kind of a Funny Story" by Ned Vizzini